I vaguely remember sitting silently in my room when I was in preschool, conflicted with the question my teacher had asked me that morning: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” There in front of my desk is a worksheet with a blank on ‘my future job.’ How absurd was it for us to know what we would like to do for the rest of our lives in preschool, right? So I indecisively put “firefighter” just to get the troubling thought out of my head.
My future has always been unknown to me, and I had always felt like I was behind compared to everyone else’s life agenda. People in elementary already planning for what college to go to, and what route to take, while I felt that something was ahead of what I needed to know. But reaching high school, I realized it was about time I just started, anywhere, on what I wanted to do with my life. This thought tumbled into my signing up for AP Computer Science my senior year.
As a brief history lesson, I really enjoyed the class. Java felt so refreshing to me, and completing coding assignments was so rewarding. I felt that this was the path I should continue to pursue. I also had a lot of friends and family who supported me on my software engineering journey, making me feel even more comfortable about my decision.
Presently, I am faced with another issue: not having enough experience. Creating this techfolio for my Software Engineering class made me realize how little experience I have with software programming, outside of my classes. It has not been stressed how important applying for internships or creating side projects is in class, so I had never put in the full effort in doing so. Yet I am glad that I realized this now because I still have some time to fill out my portfolio.
Maybe the surreal experiences, giant offices, and aesthetic buildings of Google, Microsoft, and Facebook headquarters might bias my choices, but currently, I hope to get a career in software programming for a large tech company (there is also a bit of bragging rights to that position as well). I hope that my future experiences such as internships and projects will enable me to gain knowledge and an inside look at the different sectors of computer science so I can make a better career decision.
There is still so much for me to learn, but I am still excited to pursue my career in software engineering. Computer science is a field that requires a lot of patience, and practice, especially since it is such a broad yet complex field. So as advice to anyone reading this and future advice to myself, calm down and just keep moving forward! Even if I do something wrong, it will become a learning moment, and will just better me as a person and as a coder in the future. To quote to amazing Steve Jobs: “Stay hungry, stay foolish.”